A team of researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine has discovered that virtual reality can be a powerful weapon in the fight against addiction, centering around the idea of helping addicts build a “therapeutic alliance with self.” and launched a startup called RelateXR. Their future with and without drugs.
RelateXR uses virtual reality to help recovering addicts envision the consequences of their current actions, or alternative actions.
“There’s a lot of evidence that people with addiction have difficulty connecting with their personal future,” says Brandon Oberlin, founder and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Neurology at Indiana University School of Medicine. says the doctor. “Behavioral economics shows that people with addictions place less importance on their future than people without addictions.”
Offering what its founders call “remedial imagination training,” RelateXR creates custom avatars, including cloned versions of voices, based on individual users’ photos, allowing them to travel 15 years into the future. so that you can find reasons to value it even more. When they put on the headset, they can meet two future selves. One is myself in recovery and the other is still using drugs.
“We all have a future with endless possibilities,” Oberlin explains.
RelateXR’s Brandon Oberlin (center), Andrew Nelson (left), and Izzy Branham (right) have deployed a … (+) VR solution as an adjunct to traditional approaches to drug addiction.
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The research team received nearly $5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to support their patent-pending invention. Currently undergoing clinical trials. When I spoke to the team in July, the feature was being tested with about 71 users, including controls.
Many medical professionals are exploring new ways to help the many Americans addicted to opioids and other drugs. More than 96,000 people now die from drug overdoses each year, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics. The center says seven out of 10 overdose deaths involve opioids. “There’s a huge need for this,” Oberlin said. “The scale of the problem is enormous. The death toll is particularly shocking.”
The situation is improving, albeit slightly, as the public becomes more educated about the dangers of opioids. The Centers for Disease Control says the number of drug overdose deaths will decrease slightly from 111,029 in 2022 to 107,543 in 2023, with a decline in opioid-related deaths driving this trend. I discovered that. However, deaths from other types of drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamines, increased.
Users of the RelateXR app can imagine their life if they stopped using drugs, including all the daily choices that come with it, or if they continued using drugs. Those who choose to effectively quit can see a future with new activities to replace drugs, such as rebuilding a relationship with a spouse, raising a family, or going back to school.
“Our idea is to connect people with their future selves by making them a reality,” Oberlin says. “When it feels alive, real, and authentic, it creates non-addictive, positive, social decision-making. We took this idea and ran with it.”
Oberlin has 20 years of experience in addiction research. Other founding team members are Andrew Nelson, who runs RelateXR’s technology and owns gaming startup Half Full Nelson, and Andrew Nelson, who runs RelateXR’s business development and previously worked with Fia, a machine learning-powered talent acquisition platform. Izzy Branham, an undergraduate student and co-founder of Technologies. The university’s technology transfer office connected Branham with the RelateXR team.
To develop the app, the founders worked with people in the early stages of recovery — people who have been completely sober for anywhere from two weeks to 11 and a half months. A randomized controlled trial found that addicts using the app improved their self-efficacy (a predictor of successful recovery) within 30 days.
Nelson points out that the realistic nature of the avatars is one reason the app is so effective. “Having a naturally speaking version of yourself makes a huge difference,” he says.
The founders aim to offer RelateXR at a price point comparable to medication-assisted therapy (MAT), considered by some experts to be the gold standard for opioid use disorder treatment. The founders view RelateXR as an adjunct to MAT, 12-step programs, and other treatment approaches.
Relate XR is in talks with the FDA about approving the app as a medical device. “Our goal is primarily to roll this out to treatment centers and individual therapist offices,” Oberlin says.
Many treatment facilities have their reasons for continuing to embrace new advances. Addicts often lose trust in their treatment center. A recovering crack addict who at one time lived on the streets of Minneapolis said in an interview on local television that he never trusted anyone, not cops, counselors or probation officers, but that the app only asked him to trust himself. He said he liked the fact that he was That’s all I hear,” he said.
